The old Comedia cinema, on the Llobregat-mountain corner of the Gran Via-Passeig de Gràcia intersection, will become the Carmen Thyssen Museum in the near future, where the baroness's private collection will be exhibited and where other cultural events will also take place. For now, the project has already entered the Barcelona City Council awaiting its definitive review and a vote in the plenary session, after a debate that promises to be lively.
The museum will be erected at a point of great importance due to its centrality. It is the most important intersection in the Eixample, where the monument to Ildefons Cerdà is precisely being considered for installation; a centenary debt to an engineer who forever changed Barcelona's urban planning, but who suffered ostracism because the bourgeoisie of this city felt it was a great aggression that his project was imposed in the mid-19th century by the ministry and Antoni Rovira i Trias's project, more classic, radial, in the style of Paris and which won the competition called by the city council, was discarded. Cerdà's was more revolutionary, hygienist, and long-term for a city that had finally freed itself from the oppression of its walls and was going to conquer the plain and the world.
Although time has proven the engineer from Centelles right and today the Eixample is one of Barcelona's great hallmarks in the world, the civil society of the time experienced it very badly. Even an architect of Puig i Cadafalch's prestige went so far as to say that the grid design and wide perpendicular streets were designed for repression, for the good functioning of machine guns. The punishment was that Cerdà still does not have a monument to remember him to this day. Now, finally, it seems that this will be remedied.
"Those were the golden years of modernism that left so many immortal works very close precisely to the Comedia"The tribute to Cerdà will coexist with the Carmen Thyssen Museum, and the truth is that everything will fit, because the narrative of the collection it will house will coincide with the era in which the Eixample was developed. The works on display will span a period between the demolition of the walls and the 1920s of the last century, a time of great creative, cultural, architectural, and industrial explosion. These were the golden years of modernism that left so many immortal works very close precisely to the Comedia, on a Passeig de Gràcia where the great families competed to have the best and most spectacular building. La Pedrera, Casa Batlló, Casa Amatller, Casa Lleó Morera, the block of discord, Gaudí, Domènech i Montaner, Puig i Cadafalch.
Before being a cinema, the Comedia was the Palau Marcet, the residence of the businessman and politician Frederic Marcet, who had it erected between 1887 and 1890. It was inhabited until his death in 1935. Then, the entrepreneur Josep Maria Padró proposed converting it into a theater, but the civil war postponed its opening until 1941. To raise the curtain, the play Aves y pájaros, by Jacinto Benavente, was chosen.
The crisis in the theater sector led to its conversion into a cinema in the late 1950s. And in April 1960, on the new screen, the thriller A Cry in the Fog, starring the then great star Doris Day, was screened. Years later, the cinema adopted the new model of multiplexes. First three, and then five, which are still there, with their seats and projectors intact. The cinema definitively closed in 2024.
Years and different renovations have passed. Nothing remains of the original palace. Nor of the theater. The conversion into a multiplex took everything inside. Only the facade remained. At least, the roofs were restored, replacing the scale-shaped tiles as they were in the Palau Marcet. Now, inside, only the vestiges of the historic Comedia cinema remain. Still, at the main entrance, The Hunger Games and A Fuego Lento, some of the last films exhibited, are advertised. Three of the four businesses that were installed on the ground floor also remain. One, which was a shoe store, closed some time ago never to reopen. The rest will close when their respective rental contracts expire.
The Stoneweg fund is the new owner and manages its conversion into a museum. They specialize in cultural operations. They are responsible for the Palau Martorell, on Ample Street, now being an exhibition center where an exhibition of Sorolla's paintings can be seen today. They are also in the process of converting the old Godó i Trias factory, in L'Hospitalet, into a cultural facility.
Among the works that can be admired in the future museum, there will be canvases by Ramon Casas, Santiago Rusiñol, Joaquim Mir, and Isidre Nonell. A new building will emerge behind the facade of the old cinema and palace. The architects' intention is for it to blend with the sky. Temporary exhibitions will be organized inside. A bookstore, an art shop, and an interior restaurant will complete the offer.
The Carmen Thyssen Museum will arrive at a time when the city's museums are writing a new chapter. The MNAC and Macba are going to expand, and the Fundació Miró, unable to grow, will reopen the Jardí dels Xiprers. It will be the first museum with a climate refuge in its exhibition route.
The intersection of Gran Via and Paseo de Gràcia will soon acquire new notoriety. The Carmen Thyssen Museum, the Cerdà monument, and some other possible surprises will turn it into something more than a set of four passing traffic lights with very little interest, which is what it is now.